January 22 – 23, 2007
Attentive readers of this blog will recall that the Walkabout plan, design, scheme – if you will – is to circle the Pacific in a clockwise fashion, seeking new experiences, opportunities for growth, yadda yadda and yadda ya. My next destination was the South Sea isle of Fiji so you may be excused for wondering how I ended up back in the USA, Los Angeles to be precise. Chalk it up to a quirk of transpacific flight routings, a you can’t get there from here sort of deal. I actually also could have crossed from South America to Fiji via Easter Island, which would have been quite nice since I was eager to see the mysterious stone megaliths dotting same. The catch is that I would have had to spend a full week there before catching a flight out. And though I like a nice stone megalith as much as the next guy, I figured a week would be more than enough to see them all, solve the unsolved mysteries, and then become seriously bored with the whole business. So I opted for a routing through LA instead.
I had a one night, two day stopover in the City of Angels. Eager to make the most of it and get fully into the flow of LA life, I rented a convertible, a GPS unit, and a hair piece, put the top down, cranked up the Doors on the CD player and drove up the entrance ramp and out onto the great American freeway experience. Actually, Alamo wouldn’t rent me a hairpiece, which is just as well since it would have blown away together with everything else in the car. I don’t quite get the convertible concept. At least for your faithful but follicley-challenged correspondent either your head bakes, or your hat blows off, or if you secure it with neck strap it still blows off and you get garroted by the cord. Of course, if you started off with a full head of hair you wouldn’t have those problems, but then if you had a full head of hair you wouldn’t need the convertible in the first place. In any event, if cruising for babes was the objective it would have been rather awkward. Since my rented Chrysler Crossfire has a trunk barely large enough for my third grade lunch box and no back seat I would have had to ask any blonde bombshell I picked up to balance my suitcase on her lap. (Kathy, I joke of course. I’m not having that type of midlife crisis.)
Renting a GPS unit is a nifty way to see an unfamiliar city. I was able to plug in names dimly recalled from my LA iconography and see where I ended up – Wilshire Boulevard, Rodeo Drive, Mullholland Drive, and so on. I visited the new Getty museum, which is architecturally fabulous and a decent collection. Well worth the stop.
An obligatory visit was Venice Beach where I sat down at a sidewalk café and ordered a good old bacon cheeseburger with string fries and a beer, and settled back to watch the human carnival wheel by. I have to say that after three weeks of eating foreigner food a cheeseburger tasted great. And the scenery was endlessly entertaining. All manner of wheeled vehicles, skate boards, roller blades, bikes and unicycles passed by. Some cameramen were filming what was either a porno film or a documentary on the problem of excessive shrinkage in women’s halter tops. A trio of drag queens, a barefoot surfer with board, a woman who looked like Cruella DeVille, complete with cigarette holder, wheeling a baby and carrying a bongo drum, all passed by. Watching this pageantry on a cool 65 degree January California day, I could understand why people want to live there. I can see why people put up with the high costs, crime, earthquakes riots, fires and so on to live in a place where it is eternal spring. It all started to make sense. Except of course for Arnold. I’ll never understand the Governator.
Your faithful correspondent,
Walkabout Dave
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